Does marketo have a simple web-form to new-lead option using POST method? I'm getting tired of all the scripts and inline styles and form conflicts etc of the form 2.0 to collect a simple email address. Other CRM's like zoho do this and it is very handy in a lot of instances. Thanks in advance!

Of course. The <noscript> variant of a Marketo form, posting to the HTTP-redirecting /save endpoint, is exactly that.

But it's a lot easier to use the Forms JS API to post a form in the background. You don't need your visible form to be a Marketo form. It can be a completely bespoke form, just capture the fields and relay them to a hidden Marketo form and call the Marketo form's submit(). This is a very common setup.

However, it does leave out one important step, which is that the native HTML form's submit method needs to be stopped.

In other words:

<form id="visibleForm">
<input name="whatever">
<button type="submit">
</form>
<script>
document.querySelector("#visibleForm").addEventListener("submit",function(e){
e.preventDefault();
// now you can continue to add fields to the Marketo form and call its submit(), and the HTML form won't also submit!
});
</script>

As for conflicts, multiple forms on one page, which can be avoided in other ways ideally though.

1. display:none doesn't seem to be working on the Marketo Form element

Are you overriding display with an !important somewhere? Should be a no-brainer to hide the form.

2. How do I collect / change the values that are submitted. ...

Reading values from HTML forms depends on the field type.

For any text-like field type (<input type="text"> and related) it's simply the .value property of the element.

For <input type="checkbox">, <input type="radio">, and <select>, the procedure is somewhat more complicated because you need to find the selected item(s) and concatenate their values. (Marketo expects semicolon-delimited strings for multivalued fields.)

Since Push Lead (like all REST APIs) requires that you build another entire other layer and implement rate-limiting and map form inputs in the same way, it surely is not a substitute in the general case.